How Our Enlightenment Inheritance Still Cripples Our Meaning Making - Part 1

and How Overcoming It Might Open a Space for the Calling of the Sacred

Meaning in life has always been a topic close to my heart. Having been through a meaning crisis myself probably fuelled my deep interest in philosophy and psychology, in the hopes of finding an answer to the big questions of life. Although I approached these questions from a wrong angle (trying to find the one answer that would fulfil me), I still profited from the knowledge a came across.

When I was younger, romanticism brought me closer to a sense of meaning of life and did help in that regard, but that came quickly to an end when I started reading Nietzsche. The hole he blasted into my worldview at the time left a big gap, but I’m grateful for it. That hole is probably the origin of my passionate curiosity and motivation toward understanding the nature of reality. It has since matured into a deep sense of wonder and awe, which now fuels my explorations. However, since then, I have struggled to accurately describe what my relationship to the sacred truly is. At times, I got close to it again, but it was never really lasting.

Nihilism has often sunk its ruthless jaws into the depths of my existence, poisoning me with a state of being I called “The Eternal Weariness.” In it, I felt the meaninglessness of existence creep into my limbs, demoralising me and every undertaking. I once wrote a poem in German to capture that state of being - here are parts of it translated.

I feel, yet what numbs me?
I see, yet what blinds me?
I hear, yet what silences the world?
I speak, yet what smothers my voice?
I live, yet what dies within me?

My life's force dwindles, like a river flowing into the void.
With my creative will restrained, imprisoned by impenetrable walls,
All meaning has extinguished - what purpose shall I dedicate my existence to?
All direction is lost; all I feel is resistance!

This condemnation, this poison of weight,
it pulls and pulls, all into a dark void.
Nothing remains but idleness and dismay,
and all that endures is the eternal weariness' sway.

It is just as Nietzsche wrote in Thus spoke Zarathustra, speaking about a tree: “But the wind, which we cannot see, torments it and bends it where it wishes. It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst.”¹ Yet precisely that which torments us, is often the source of great things. On this note, he goes on to write: “The more it wants to rise into the heights and the light, the more determinedly do its roots strive earthwards, downwards, into the darkness, into the depths - into evil.”² And yes, I do believe that unless we are deeply rooted within in our capacity for aggression, we fall into passivity or into a negation of life itself.

Aggression in our culture has largely negative connotations, but I would argue we need to read it in a more neutral way. Aggression comes from the Latin verb aggredi, meaning “to approach” or “to attack”. It is a compound of ad = "toward" or "to" and gradi = "to go." It speaks of a movement that brings the aggressor toward an object.³ In this it is painted as a force that fuels and drives our actions and not necessarily as something negative. It is when it turns into violence that it becomes that which we are critical of.

But this passivity can also be caused by the absence of a force that is capable of willingly confronting life’s challenges and tragedies. It transforms and makes better, by shaping the realisation of possibility into actuality with benevolent intent, fuelled by its faith in its inherent transformational power. In this, it doesn’t easily give into despair, but is hopeful and places trust in expressing our best capabilities and competencies. It is capable of seeing the beautiful and of following a transcendent good, which could be characterised as a relationship we can be true to. This very force was weakened within me, but there have been other unseeable forces at work as well, that have made it difficult to find meaning.

The Power of Stories

When you engage with philosophy, you quickly begin to notice the innumerable implizit assumptions that lie hidden beneath the explizit patterns of our thinking. Before engaging with it, I was blind to my cultural inheritance and also didn’t care for it. Now more than ever I feel like that, the degree to which we don’t understand the history of our culture, is the degree to which we are unable to break free of its limitations. Vervaeke made a similar argument about biblical illiteracy in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. He argues that the degree to which we don’t have a grasp of the grammar of the bible, is the degree to which we don’t have a grasp on the grammar of our own cognition.⁴ Every way or pattern of thinking rest upon a myriad of assumptions which, in a way, make us float above the inexhaustible ground of reality by simplifying the complexity into manageable bits and thus give us a secure place to build upon. But how secure is this place?

Behind the content of sensible thought, lies a process by which it came about. This process must be constrained, among other things, by the criteria of intelligibility. The intelligibility of reality is a wondrous miracle. We are somehow equipped to understand it’s complexity, beauty, order⁵ and the nature of ourselves. In a way, we are evolution becoming conscious of itself⁶ and of the world we evolved in. The miracle is, that our consciousness is somehow making sense of and can tune into the ongoing ordering of the cosmos. However, this is not to say that we do that without mistakes. We are perennially prone to self-deception and beyond that, limited in our capacity to penetrate the depths of reality and above all, often lack the wisdom to accommodate that hard won depth appropriately.

If we look at it through the lens of problem formulation, we are constantly transforming ill-defined problems into well-defined problems. This transformation, establishes a frame through which we can adequately deal with the problem at hand. By this we become more independent of the very process by which the transformation was possible in the first place. We transform chaos into order, by framing the problem well, that is, defining the initial state, the goal state and a way of navigating the problem space. In this we become more efficient at solving a particular problem.

Having a worldview provides a puzzle piece for the solution to the ill-defined problem of existence. We essentially establish a narrative, for instance, living a good life with all its implications, which provides a goal, paired with a coherent way of achieving it. In that we have a interpretative framework by which we understand the world and how to act in it, to bring about the story of our existence. We better do not underestimate the indirect power of our stories on our lives. There is almost a infinite number of bad stories, but only a few that lead us to where we want to be. We know that even from bad good can come, and vice versa, but that means we can’t find the perfect story that achieves all we want, if we assume that a perfect story entails not having to sacrifice anything for the good we want to bring about. Therefore, knowing what you want is one thing but it is always surpassed by knowing what you want and knowing what you are willing to sacrifice for it. On that note Plato wrote: "How and in what manner one aspires to become according to their soul, so too does each of us generally become, almost always." What we become is partly determined by what we worship, or in less religious language, by what we value and aspire towards, even (or mostly) unconsciously.

To leap back to our presuppositions that lie hidden within the worldviews we subscribe to, we often make the mistake to elevate our worldviews and their assumptions on which they rest, to a higher epistemic position than they deserve. What do I mean? We mistake our beliefs about reality, with reality itself. You might think, this is hardly news, is it? You are right, mistaking the map for the territory is nothing new. However, the more context-invariant a pattern is, the more situations it affects. Unless we experience a profound systematic insight into all situations at once, we only slowly unlearn this fallacy.

The Scientific Worldview and the Bifurcation of Nature

I had a hard time evaluating, what accounts as the popular scientific narrative today. I do think there is a lot of variation between people outside of science and in science but also between scientist in specific disciplines. This is why I decided to focus on a specific view of reality that seems to be reasonable present, not only in scientist but also in the culture at large. A very large part of “mainstream” science is its claim of being the only path to objective truth. McGilchrist describes how we see objectivity like this:

“We are here and the world is there. We are ‘subject’ and it is ‘object’. We want to have knowledge of how, in itself, the world really is. Science provides us with that objective knowledge by taking ‘us’ out of the picture, so removing subjective distortion from its objective presentation of how, in itself, the world actually is.”⁷

We read this and think, "Yeah, that makes sense."If you ever watched Rick and Morty, you know that Rick is often saying things like “Listen Morty, I hate to break it to you, but what people commonly call love is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed.” While seeing how love, is reduced to a chemical reaction is comical because it is so absurd, there is a part of us that goes “kind of true…”, while another feels off about it. That part that feels stumped, recognises the depreciation and sees how wrong it is, because it lives love. The part that agrees is the part that places this measure of truth on a pedestal, and accepts it as the gold standard for realness. Subconsciously, it begins to compare everything else to that standard and dismisses or becomes very critical of everything that doesn’t fulfil this standard. In a more philosophical sense it holds the position that everything in its ontology must be derivable from the natural sciences namely physics, chemistry and biology. However, in this view is a fundamental problem which hasn’t been recognised widely by scientist or philosophers.

In their book The Blindspot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience Frank, Gleiser and Thompson argue that a specific worldview of science has a blindspot. One aspect of this blindspot is explained using Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of the Bifurcation of Nature, which highlights that science abstracts the perception of nature “to focus on the mathematizable aspects of nature.”⁸ While this abstraction is beneficial, it becomes problematic when the “demotion of concrete experience” occurs alongside the “elevation of abstractions”⁹ as being more real. Just like in Rick in Morty, the chemical reaction becomes more real than love itself.

Objectivity and Subjectivity

This worldview presupposes that the world is cut into subjectivity and objectivity. Chemical Reactions are considered more fundamental, more real than, subjective experience. But in this we are mistaking the distinction between objective and subjective to be a dichotomy that is reflective of reality. A dichotomy is not the same as a distinction. Dichotomies describe things that are entirely different and opposed to each other whereas distinctions only highlight a difference between similar things. If we believe in the subjective/objective dichotomy, we claim a ontological dualism, or in other words, we claim that reality is divided into a “subjective world” and “objective world”. It is common practice to assign to the objective world more realness and/or validity, because it is less illusory and reliable. However, the distinction between objective and subjective cannot be mistaken to be a ontological statement - it is but a helpful philosophical distinction for making sense of reality.

Facts are Theory-laden

Moreover, we make a commitment that the world exists independently of our knowledge of it and that we can gain objective knowledge through science by bridging the gap between what we subjectively assume, to that what we can objectively claim to be true, by making use of robust scientific tools like experimentation, peer-review studies and causal inference. In this we assume to gain knowledge as facts, independent of our values and hopes of what we want to be true. And while it is true, that science provides the most rigorous method of preventing human bias in gaining knowledge as facts, we need to be careful to not forget the interwovenness of facts and values. McGilchrist writes, “the flawed fact-value distinction is itself an appeal to value - the value of ‘facts’ - and is in turn based on value - inevitably and rightly - not on fact.”¹⁰ We again forget that facts aren’t entirely objective. Why?

This brings us deeper into the question of how facts come about. Facts are often theory-laden. For example, consider the meaning of -20°C. Its interpretation, of course, depends on the underlying physical theory, and on who you ask and why this fact is relevant to them. Measuring temperature has a long history, with significant developments beginning in the 17th century, which coincided with the emergence of thermodynamics. The meaning of -20°C is not inherently obvious - it appears so only because we are accustomed to it. If you ask a layperson wether they want to go outside, they may think twice about it, since -20°C is pretty cold. If you ask a physicist, they might explain the kinetic energy of particles. In other words, what we make of facts is subject to interpretation and in addition to that, dependent on the process by which they came about.

On a side note, theories we can trust depend upon multiple independent but converging lines of evidence. We trust the measurement of temperature. Trust however, doesn’t amount to certainty. Almost all scientific theories turned out to be wrong. Vervaeke and Mastropietro write “Science is not believed in because it gives certainty. It is believed in because it gives us self-correcting plausibility.”¹¹ They understand plausibility to mean “an argument made sensibly that stands to reason and should be taken seriously.”¹² Our explanations depend on competing plausibility judgements. Thus, “good science involves inference to the best explanation”.¹³ Consequently, the best explanation becomes the scientifically valid one.

What I aim to show is that our embeddedness within the world, results in a lived experience that offers a understanding that is a prerequisite for undertaking the scientific method. Our participation in and experience of reality is necessary to even begin asking the questions that are of value. By realising this, we cannot undermine anymore the value of our lived experience. The picture that we inherited, that subjectivity holds no value in the pursuit of truth, needs to be abandoned. In this we reclaim the significance of our lived experience, our disposition and approach towards how we do things, and our connectedness with the world. It isn’t that science bridges the gap between subjectivity and objectivity but rather that science itself makes use of our subjectivity. Combining scientific methodology with sound epistemology enhances our judgement powerfully, by ridding it of bias and fallacies in our first person experience.

Furthermore, science makes the implicit metaphysical claim that the world is intelligible to us. It seems to me, since we cannot rid ourselves from our participation, that we should optimise our subjective involvement in our aim to be objective as possible. In a way we try to minimise bias, deception, and wishful thinking, all the while optimising other aspects. In this sense, McGilchrist writes that we shouldn’t conclude that “the unimpeachable drive behind the crudely interpreted concept of objectivity is mistaken, but that we should be more nuanced in our interpretation. It is an enterprise, a continuing process, not a ‘thing’ that could ever be achieved. It involves a habit of mind and spirit, not the following of external procedures or rules. Put another way, the ‘objectivity’ lies not in propositions, but in a disciplined disposition”.¹⁴

I don’t want to put words in his mouth but what he might have hinted towards in a “habit of mind and spirit” touches probably on the question of what our attitude is towards anything we do in life. If we want our work to bear fruit, we need to examine how we conduct ourselves during the process of doing our work or more specifically to the topic at hand, during the process of applying the scientific method. To be more nuanced and accurate, our subjective involvement is optimised on different levels of analysis, which obviously begs the question of what characterises a good scientist in general? This is far too complicated to go into but I imagine that certain character traits, as well as our dispositions and aspirations, ideals and standards we held ourselves accountable to, serve as top-down constraints, which express themselves as influences on our habitual actions, which in turn mark the degree to which we are successful at being objective.

This concludes Part 1 of this exploration of our implicit assumptions. In Part 2, I will attempt to explore a relational ontology capable of overcoming substance ontology. Beyond that, I will expand upon the concept of realness and what kind of truths shape our self-development. Additionally, I aim to delve deeper into why efficient causes, aren’t the only type of causes and how this relates to the philosophical question of the One and the Many. Finally, I will explore how all these ideas shape our understanding of what sacredness can be.

*Note: This article has been inspired by John Vervaeke’s course on Beyond Atheism and Theism: Einstein and Spinoza's Orientation to Sacredness.

1. Nitzsche, F. (2003). Thus spoke Zarathustra. Penguin Books, p. 69

2. ibid, p. 69

3. https://www.seele-und-gesundheit.de/psycho/aggression.html

4. Vervaeke, J. Mastropietro, C. (2024) Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Book One: Origins. Storygrid Publishing, p. 63

5. McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter with Things. Perspectiva Press, p. 1092

6. ibid, p. 1093

7. McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter with Things. Perspectiva Press, p. 413

8. Frank, A. Gleiser, M. Thompson, E. (2024). The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience. MIT Press, p. 20

9. ibid, p. 20

10. McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter with Things. Perspectiva Press, p. 416

11. Vervaeke, J. Mastropietro, C. (2024). Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Book One: Origins. Storygrid Publishing, p. 218

12. ibid, p. 218

13. ibid, p. 218

14. McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter with Things. Perspectiva Press, p. 417